Two-Deep and Recruiting Class Evaluation: Oregon Ducks

Continuing my summer homework, here’s the next deep dive into a two deep and recruiting class, this time Oregon’s. You can see Alabama’s, LSU’s and Texas A&M’s evals here, here and here.

Again, let’s get a few things in order before you read these evals. It’s very important to read this if you want to understand where I’m coming from.

1. Rather than rank someone with a nebulous star rating or a happy face, I am applying an NFL draft grade to them since this is a metric that many of us understand. To be clear, when I write that someone is a first-round talent, I am not predicting that they will be selected in the first round of the draft (though some certainly will). What I am saying is that this player has physical ability commensurate with players who are typically drafted in the first round. The same standard applies with other denominations by round.

2. The two deeps, heights and weights are taken from either the school’s web site or from Rivals.com. If you quibble with who I have on the depth chart, I have no answer for you. Just go with the eval provided. Some of the recruit lists might not include late signees or it might include guys who won’t qualify or will grayshirt. Just take the evals for what they are in that case.

3. The purpose of these evals are to give myself and the HP audience an insight into the raw talent levels of the schools in question. Coaching and scheme are not taken into account.

4. I did not look at anyone else’s evals when doing my own evals. I did not look at stats. I did not read what coaches had to say. I did not peek to see how many or which schools offered a given recruit. In other words, I avoided outside influences as much as possible and basically just looked at as much tape as was available and made my call.

5. I know evaluations of this nature are controversial. Some of you are going to vehemently disagree with some of them. Some of you will wonder what my qualifications are for making them. All I ask is that you put my evaluations to the test in the coming seasons and we’ll see how accurate I was. In the meantime, I welcome any insights or helpful comments on these players.

6. In some cases, for speed’s sake, my evals are very brief, especially with players who I don’t need to evaluate further. A guy like Johnny Manziel? We all know about him. I don’t waste much words adding to what we already know. In other cases, I have limited or bad tape on a player and have to make a snap eval based on what I am able to see.

7. When I have all my evaluations, I will rank the teams and players according to talent level and also overall.

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Chris Huston, A.K.A. ‘The Heisman Pundit‘, is a Heisman voter and the creator and publisher of Heismanpundit.com, a site dedicated to analysis of the Heisman Trophy and college football.
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When I write that someone is a first-round talent, I am not predicting that they will be selected in the first round of the draft (though some certainly will). What I am saying is that this player has physical ability commensurate with players who are typically drafted in the first round.

If I had to guess, I think 4 of those 6 players will actually be selected in the first round. ‘

When I say someone is a late round talent, I’m saying their talent is on par with someone usually drafted late. However, other factors such as production, combine, off-field stuff, etc., play a part in determining where they actually get picked. Someone with late round talent could, through production or testing, play themselves into a mid-round selection. Conversely, someone with 3rd round talent could have poor production and not get drafted.

Actually 21 among those teams leaves plenty for everyone else. The 21 are spread amongst the 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and possibly 2018 drafts. The fact that top-5 teams will have a guy or two each in the first round each year isn’t a stretch at all.

Wondering why you listed Deanthony Thomas as “Not very strong or durable” ? If you have watched the tape then you should have seen him powering through a few defenders at times to get to the endzone, sometimes multiple tacklers, and I have never seen him miss a game due to any kind of injury. So how did you determine that he is not very strong or durable ?

He’s not a power back. He’s got a small frame and he’s very light. He goes down fairly easy. He has missed games in high school and Oregon does its best to manage his touches and they’ve done a good job of it.

However, you are rating athletic talent as of today, yet showing a lot of freshmen and sophomores who are still learning and growing and in any cases, they will be much better in their junior and senior years.

Consequently, I really do not know how to evaluate your analyses. Is this for this year only, or are you suggesting what they will be like when they are draftable?

If it is the latter, I find it a difficult to understand how you can rate people who have not had full benefit of coaching, physical training, growth, improvements in body functioning, etc.

If it is the former, then this a good article to tell us what to expect from them for this season only.

Well that isn’t exactly true. The majority of guys get bigger, stronger, and faster with age in the college ranks. Staying with Oregon just look at a player like LaMichael James. His strength increased, conditioning, and overall speed increased a lot as his time in Eugene went on. I guess gaining athleticism can be a subjective term because it depends on how you define it, but my definition of gaining athleticism would include gaining strength, and increasing speed etc.

Are you keeping track of how many grades per round you give? I know you said you do it based off of talent, but it seems the ducks have an unreasonable amount of first round talent given their 1st round history. Which, according to a quick google, is 13 player in the ducks history.

Again, I am not predicting that all these guys will go in the first round, but that their physical attributes are commensurate with a typical first round pick. That said, this is the most talented Ducks team in history and I would not go off of past performance as an indication of any future draft results.